


The Housewife

by Do_the_Cool_Whip



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-08
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-01-25 19:49:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21361729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Do_the_Cool_Whip/pseuds/Do_the_Cool_Whip
Summary: It took one look for Hermione to know the truth. Harry wasn’t ready to become an auror. He would do so because people expected it of him; he would do so because he expected it of himself, but it wasn’t what he needed right now. With that in mind, she gave him an excuse, a reason not to go down that path just yet. More importantly, she promised herself to continue doing so until he was finally ready.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Harry Potter/Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley
Comments: 106
Kudos: 502





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like the world needs more HG/HP/RW, so I'm just going to casually continue to write and post it and pretend I don't have a mild obsession with it.

Harry stands facing Kingsley, listening intently, as the man tries to recruit them. Hermione knows she should be listening to him; the offer isn’t just for Harry, but for her and Ron, as well. She can’t, though. She can’t bring herself to focus on Kingsley when all she can see is the effect his words are having on Harry.

She can see the stress lines in his forehead deepening, the bags under his eyes growing, the shadows in his eyes darkening, the green of his irises dimming, and the weight on his shoulder increasing.

She understands why this is happening. With Voldemort dead, Death Eaters are being purged from the ministry and fleeing to avoid punishment. The DMLE needs to get aurors from somewhere. So why not the people who had fought them off on several occasions? Why not the war heroes who were responsible for the defeat of the greatest Dark Lord in centuries?

Why not? Because they are fucking kids. Because they are eighteen, Harry hasn’t even had his eighteenth birthday and they have just finished living a year on the run. A year without safety, shelter, and food. A goddamn year of hell and they are tired. Harry is tired. He needs a break, but no one seems to give a damn. Everyone is just so excited to shake his hand and congratulate him that they’ve all ignored the cost of this victory.

This is exactly what Dumbledore went through upon his defeat of Grindelwald. In a society recovering from near ruin, the masses flock to who they believe to be the strongest and wisest person just because they’re too scared to try on their own. Heaping responsibility after responsibility onto someone else so it’s no longer a problem they have to deal with. If things go wrong, well, it’s not their fault.

She’s not being fair. Kingsley is legitimately trying his best deal with the problem. The auror force is severely understaffed. They need people they can stick into the field quickly without having to worry about the time it takes to train them. Ideally, they’re looking for people who don’t need any training.

And suddenly Hermione is grateful for the Half-Blood Prince. Her excuse for why the three of them can’t accept this offer. Because while the Wizarding World may be eager to flock to Harry and the DMLE may be desperate for aurors, Hermione refuses to jump on that bandwagon. Because someone has to put Harry first.

And since Harry refuses to do it himself, Hermione will do it for him.

“We can’t, Kingsley,” she lies, interrupting the man with the sweetest, most apologetic, sincere, and sympathetic expression she can muster. “We lack the qualification and the knowledge base necessary.

Harry and Ron both turn to her incredulous, jaws slipping open and eyes widened. To be fair, Kingsley’s expression is only mildly better.

“Harry, Ron, and I are good in a fight. If all you need is for us to battle the remaining Death Eaters in a one on one or even one on five fight, we’ll be able to help you. But, you’ll need us to be able to do more than that. Track, break wards, identify both poisons and antidotes from sight alone, among other things. And quite frankly, we can’t do any of that. You’d be better off looking for candidates among the students who graduated from Hogwarts two years ago. In fact, I can give you a list of potential candidates to go through.”

Harry glares at her and she can already see the arguments he’s creating in his mind. “Harry, a Death Eater throws a sparkling yellow potion at Ron and misses. The vial shatters and the potion spills on the floor. It’s mildly viscous, but has a very sweet smell, and a grey smoke rises from it slowly. What do you do?”

It’s a Wasting Potion, a potion designed to eat away at person’s body until they shrivel up into nothing. The sweet smell and the sparkles are incredibly distinctive, but the grey smoke indicates that it’s the highly volatile type. The kind of potion where a wizard would cast a spell at it and it would explode, showering an area in a backlash of magical energy and deadly potion. It’s a good question, this type of Wasting Potion is easy to brew and is one of the most common potion threats aurors face when encountering Dark Wizards.

Kingsley straightens and looks at Harry intently, which causes him to hesitate for a second before answering. “Banish it.”

Kingsley winces and Hermione nods to herself in satisfaction. “Do you understand why we can’t join just, yet?”

“What?” Ron asks, “That sounded like a good choice to me.”

“Unfortunately,” Kingsley says, “it’s a choice that would result in everyone being severely injured or dead.”

“What?” Harry steps back, eyes flicking over to Hermione.

“I’ll explain later,” she says.

“I can understand if Harry and Ron lack the knowledge to be effective aurors at the moment, but what about you?” Kingsley looks at her and Hermione can see him trying to piece together her motives.

“I need to tutor these two to get them field ready by the end of next year. Furthermore, I really want to finish my Hogwarts education.” She can see the disbelief in his eyes, the way they narrow on her, but Hermione straightens her back and forges forward. “If you need us to help you apprehend someone, come get us. We’ll be at Hogwarts; otherwise, we’ll just be in your way.”

“I understand. Owl me that list of names and I’ll go through them.”

Hermione nods at him, fighting back her own guilt at the thought of turning down this responsibility, of not doing what is needed of her. But, then she sees the small tinge of relief in Harry’s eyes and the guilt vanishes.

She’s doing the right thing.

* * *

Hermione does her part. She tutors Ron and Harry in all the areas they’re still lacking knowledge to become aurors. She forces people to give Harry some space when they all flock to him. She gives both him and Ginny advice whenever they ask her about each other.

And she knows Ron does his part too. He’s the first to crack a joke and distract people when Harry is overwhelmed by their attention. He insists on them having downtime when they all feel like they’re falling into a downward spiral. Sometimes, early in the morning when she goes to wake her boys, she finds him sleeping in Harry’s bed and knows he must have collapsed there after waking Harry from a nightmare.

It was a good year, but now that the year is ending, she can see the shadows returning to Harry’s eyes. He laughs less now. His nightmares are returning with full force. He’s eating less. He’s not in a good place and Hermione knows without a doubt that it’s his looming career as an auror that’s weighing him down.

He isn’t ready, yet. It’s only been a year, a single year since that nightmare ended. If he’s not ready, then Hermione is going to make absolutely sure that he doesn’t go down that path. Harry won’t become an auror before he’s ready, not as long as she’s still breathing.

She feels a little bad, though. Because no matter how much she scrambles to find a reason for Harry to put off being an auror for another year, she can’t find a good one. Which means she’s going to have to settle for a mediocre one and guilt Harry into taking it.

“Harry,” she says, causing him to look up from his game of chess with Ron. “I...” She trails off. She bites her lip and fidgets with her shirt, making sure to look anywhere, but at him. The more nervous and guilty she looks the better.

“Yeah?” Harry turns to face her fully and she can already see the concern in every line of his face, in the subtle inflection of his voice, in the way he reaches out to grasp one of her fidgeting hands.

She feels a real wave of shame. She’s manipulating him. He’s her best friend and she’s manipulating him. Seconds ago, this didn’t seem so bad. Just a way to keep those awful shadows out of Harry’s eyes, a way to keep him smiling.

And she remembers why she’s doing this.

It doesn’t matter if this makes her a terrible person. It doesn’t matter if it makes her feel ashamed of herself. She’s doing this for Harry and as long as he’s okay, as long as he’s able to smile and relax, she knows she’ll be able to live with herself.

“I need to ask you for a favour.” Ron looks over at her, prying his eyes off the chessboard. “I just—you can refuse if you want—”

“Anything,” Harry states.

She huffs at him, equally touched and frustrated with how easily he agrees. “Don’t just agree to people without hearing the conditions first.”

Harry rolls his eyes, “Yes, mum. I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Do I look like Mrs. Weasley to you?”

“No!” Ron blurts out. “Not even a little. Thank Merlin for that.”

She looks at him and from the corner of her eye she can see Harry doing the same. In unison they laugh, Ron with a slight twinkle in his eyes and Hermione can feel herself fall in love with him just a little more.

“Moving on,” Harry grins. “What did you need, ‘Mione?”

“I—just remember that you can say no, Harry.”

“Stop stalling.”

“I—would you mind taking another year off before becoming an auror?”

Harry has a sharp intake of breath, but Ron looks confused and she can see the gears turning in his mind. “What? Why would I—why would you need me to take another year off?” His voice is soft, but Hermione can still hear the faint tremors in it.

“I wanted to get one of my masteries before I got a job, but I couldn’t decide which one. So, I ended up choosing to get three: Ancient runes, arithmancy, and charms.” Harry is silently watching her, so Hermione ploughs on through her speech, faking that nervous rambling she’s known for. “I want to finish them all by the end of next year, but there’s no way I can get all the necessary work done on my own. I’m going to need an assistant of sort, someone to help me organize my notes and research, and also get me books and other material.”

“Why didn’t you ask me?” Ron asks, but there’s something in his voice. Something calculating, not the hidden jealousy Hermione would have expected.

“Ron, I tutor you. I love you very much, but I guarantee that if you became my assistant I would love you significantly less.”

Harry’s lips twitch ever so slightly into a smile and Ron grins at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That your organizational skills are a mess and you can never stay on task.”

Ron leers at her, “I thought I was pretty on task last night.”

Harry laughs and Hermione blushes ever so slightly as she reaches out to swat him.

“I understand if you need some time to think about it, Harry. You’d be behind the rest of your peers in training if you did help me.”

“No, he wouldn’t.” Ron says.

“I wouldn’t?” Harry shifts his gaze from Hermione to Ron and Hermione wonders what will come out his mouth.

“No. We’ll all be living together, right? So, I can always give you lessons on what you missed when I get back from training.”

Hermione loves this man. She loves him and she is probably going to fuck his brains out tonight. “That would work.”

Harry looks back and forth between them. “We’re getting a place together? I thought... I thought when we graduated the two of you would be move in together somewhere and I’d be at Grimmauld Place.” His voice gets softer and softer with each word and Hermione wants to reach over and pull him into a hug.

“Are you nuts? She’d probably kill me after two days of living with me.”

Hermione can’t stop her grin at the words. Ron is definitely getting his world rocked later. “Moving in together is a big step in any couple’s relationship. I think Ron and I would do better if we had someone living with us to help us ease the way into the next step.” And it has to be you, Harry, because there’s no way in hell we’re letting you live alone when we know you’re having nightmares.

“Alright, then. I’ll do it, Hermione.”

“Really, Harry, you don’t want to think about it?”

“It’s fine. Ron will keep me up to date, so I won’t fall behind.”

Hermione smiles at him, watching as an invisible weight lifted from his shoulders, and reaches out to pull him into a hug. “Thanks, Harry.”

“No problem, ‘Mione. Anyways, I’m going to head off to bed now. G’night, guys.”

They wave him off and Hermione turns to smile at Ron. Ron gives her a grin. “I can’t believe he thinks it only takes a year to get a mastery, let alone three,” he says.

Hermione feels her eyes widen ever so slightly.

“I guess,” Ron continues, “if he’s not ready to be an auror at the end of the year, you can keep him on for a couple more.”

Hermione reaches forward, grabs Ron by the face, and kisses him hard. When she pulls back, Ron looks at her shocked and she can hear the whispers of the students who are still in the common room. Leaning forward, she whispers in his ear, “Room of Requirements. Now.”

Ron turns and bolts from the room. Hermione would like to say she follows him at a more reasonable pace, but that would be a lie.

* * *

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s happened when Harry comes home half an hour after leaving to see Ginny.

He doesn’t say anything to her or Ron. He sits down on the couch and stares blankly at the television. Ron nudges her, head tilting towards Harry and she nods. It takes very little effort for them to prod Harry out of his corner, tucking him in between them. His head rests on Ron’s shoulder and Hermione keeps their fingers intertwined.

She’s suspected for a while that something wasn’t right. Ginny has been seeking her out for advice less and less. Harry has been spending less and less time with her. Last week, when they’d been leaving the Burrow after a family dinner, Harry and Ginny had shared the most uncomfortable and awkward kiss Hermione had ever shared. Ginny had been far more interested in speaking to Neville and Luna and Harry had spent most of his time with her and Ron.

The two of them still laugh and joke around together, but it’s far closer to the relationship between close friends or siblings than lovers. And it seems the two of them have finally accepted that.

“You’ll never be alone,” Ron murmurs, grabbing the remote and turning on the television. “You’re stuck with us for life.”

Hermione picks up the novel she’s currently reading from the coffee table and flips it open. There’s nothing else that can be said on the matter.

* * *

It’s been six months, since they graduated from Hogwarts and moved in together. They’ve settled in nicely, even though they’re technically living in two homes. Grimmauld Place is their wizarding address. The place where they are registered to live and where all their mail goes. Their other home is in a muggle city that only very close friends know about, i.e., the Weasleys, Neville, and Luna.

Everything is going smoothly, Harry makes a surprisingly good assistant and he’s even occasionally willing to do some of the learning with her. Anything that seems interesting or useful he learns and teaches to Ron. His second hand auror training with Ron is going well and Hermione is surprised what a difference it’s making in Ron’s understanding of the material when he has to teach it himself.

Hermione would like to say that everything is going perfectly, but that wouldn’t be true. Harry hasn’t said anything, but she can tell he isn’t happy. It’s an unexpected issue that’s risen with her plan. She hadn’t taken into account Harry’s personality, his need to do things. He can only sit by idly for so long before he starts going stir crazy.

And his recent breakup with Ginny is just giving him one more thing to stew over in those moments when he’s left alone with his thoughts and given too much time to brood.

She needs something that will occupy his time, still be useful for his auror goals, and it would be best if it was something that she and Ron could occasionally join in for. Which is what has led her here to three separate addresses she jotted down on a sheet of paper to investigate while Harry took a break and did some housework.

The first one is a mixed martial arts dojo. She remembers the time she didn’t have her wand at the ready. She remembers that it was a thrown knife that killed Dobby. She remembers punching Draco Malfoy in the face during her third year. Even if Harry never uses the skills they teach here, they’re still important skills to know because she knows they teach discipline. And Harry has a saving people thing. If a little discipline can reign it in, Hermione will gladly find a way to trick Harry into taking lessons.

The second place she checks is a parkour training facility. It seems ridiculous when she thinks about it. When is an auror ever going to need to use parkour? Either the suspects they’re chasing can apparate or they can’t. If they can then it will become a matter of apparating and chasing their trail; if they can’t then there isn’t much of a chase. Either the suspect will get to the edge of the anti-apparition wards and apparate or if they’re simply unable to apparate, then the auror will apparate in front of them and apprehend them. Contrary to popular belief, auror work isn’t very physically demanding. Magically draining, it is; physically draining, it is not.

The last location Hermione goes to is the nearby gym. She gets all three of them memberships. The gym is just a nice place to be able to go. It’s also a safe place to go to blow off steam. And if it gets them in better shape, then they’re in better shape which means they’ll last longer in a duel. Because Kingsley does still occasionally call them in for apprehending Death Eaters. He’s been doing it less and less the more times pass, as aurors become better and more comfortable with their jobs.

Between these three activities she hopes she’ll be able to appease Harry. If he goes to do something else, something for himself, maybe he’ll be happier. She wishes she could have picked something artistic, but there was no way she’d be able to justify that. If Harry wants to do something else, she hopes he’ll look into it on his own.

It doesn’t matter if this doesn’t work. Hermione knows she’ll keep looking until she finds something that does.

* * *

They are sitting at the dinner table enjoying the meal that was carefully prepared for them by Harry. It's absolutely delicious and once again, Hermione is forced to wonder why the hell she'd been doing the cooking when they'd been living on the run. Harry always tends to cook elegant elaborate meals that taste as good as they look; Ron cooks exactly like his mother, hearty and comforting. They are both so much better than her that the fact that Hermione was responsible for feeding them in the tent is absolutely ridiculous.

Harry laughs at the conclusion of one of Ron's stories of auror training, bringing her back into the moment with a smile on her face. The sound is just another reminder that it had worked. The three activities she had picked out for Harry had been more than enough to return a smile to his face. Every day he left the house to go to at least one of the locations and he always returned in a good mood.

Both she and Ron made sure to accompany him at least twice a week and Hermione has to admit that she really loves the days when all three of them were able to go together.

One thing she hadn't expected, though, is Harry's adoration for parkour. One lesson is all it took for him to get hooked on the sport, so in love that he took up running and an adult gymnastic class and nagged his two best friends into joining him. The other thing she hadn’t expected is for Ron to fall in love with the gym. She doesn’t know if it’s a result of the promise of muscles or the reward of actually gaining them that caused it.

In the first month of working out neither she nor Harry had seen much of a difference beside improved muscle definition; Ron, on the other hand, had experienced much more noticeable gains. Enough gains that something in Ron changed. He began going to the gym more frequently. He hired one of the fitness coaches there and began to follow a nutrition plan.

There are no words to explain the incredible things this has done to Ron’s body. Ron is six feet and six inches tall. He used to be scrawny, all height with scraggly limbs. Now, he’s a hulking behemoth.

“So, ‘Mione, auror training is wrapping up and we have some sort of official ball thing on Saturday for it. Will you go with me?

Her mind flicks forward to the date and she winces, “I’m sorry, Ron. I need to have a meeting with Master Haddock for my Charms Mastery and you know how he is.”

Ron shrugs, “That’s fine. Harry, want to be my date?” When he picks up his glass of water for a sip, Hermione has to force herself not to stare at the way his muscles move.

Harry blinks up at him, half wary and half confused. After a second he grins, “Sure, but just so you know, I’m not an easy date. I expect the royal treatment.”

It’s easy for Hermione to laugh at that. Laugh and pretend that she doesn’t know how Harry is still hurting from his breakup with Ginny.

It’s only been three months, so a full recovery hasn’t occurred. It had been mostly mutual, but it had still shaken quite a bit of Harry’s faith in himself. It made him question his worth and potential as a life partner.

“Since we’re on the subject,” she says, “I just want to remind you that my school reunion is Sunday afternoon, so make sure you don’t drink too much Saturday night.”

Ron freezes and turns to Hermione with a guilty expression. “This Sunday?”

“Yes, Ron, this Sunday.”

“Oh.”

Hermione lets him stew for a couple of moments because she had marked this event down when her parents had told her about it last month. When she feels he’s suffered enough, Hermione picks up her napkin and delicately dabs at her mouth. “Harry?”

“Yes?”

“Will you be my date for my school reunion? I get the feeling that Ron is overbooked.”

“Sure thing” Harry laughs as Ron let’s out a relieved breath of air.

“Sorry, Hermione.”

“It’s quite alright.”

"Teddy's coming over next week," Harry says. "He'll be here from Friday 'til Tuesday."

"Yeah?" Ron laughs, "That'll be fun. Planning to take him to the zoo every day again?"

"I will have the biggest tantrum on my hand if I don't." Harry sighs, as if Teddy isn’t his favourite person on the planet and Harry doesn't cherish every single moment he spends with the almost two-year-old.

"Well," Hermione smiles at her two boys, "it sounds like we're about to become very busy over the next two weeks."

"Eh," Ron shrugs, "we'll pull through. We always do."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, time to try something new. I'm going to post with a couple more chapters already written so I have a buffer and can try to have something resembling an update schedule... I get the strangest feeling this isn't going to work.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I may have forgotten to update this, proving that even having a couple chapters as a buffer, isn't enough to make me a reliable updater. This is why I can't have nice things.

This should be the last time they have to do this. Hermione hopes this is the last time they have to do this. It’s been three years since the Battle of Hogwarts, but the last of Voldemort’s regime have been located. Fenrir Greyback, along with several Death Eaters, had escaped from the Hogwarts battlefield three years ago and every sign pointed to it being an inside job, and Hermione has to force herself not to think too hard about that. They don’t know who helped them escape and there’s a chance that they never will. Despite being a rookie, Ron who had defeated Greyback in battle with Neville during the Battle of Hogwarts, has been assigned to case. They’d managed to track him down, but the problem is that Greyback has managed to regroup with several members of his army.

Even worse, they’d clearly reconnected with several Death Eaters who’d managed to avoid Azkaban.

The aurors had only determined his location an hour ago, but they are going to have to mobilise to arrest them now, without time to come up with a solid plan. Because the full moon will rise in forty minutes. The werewolves are in the middle of muggle London and there is no option to wait them out for a better time to capture them.

Harry stands beside Ron, listening to the briefing with more focus than he ever used for school lessons. Harry’s head tilts to the side slightly and he interrupts the speaker. A mix of looks are thrown his way, some angry, probably thinking Harry, as a civilian, has no right to be here with people who actually worked to become aurors; others are admiring, paying more attention to Harry than the senior auror briefing them. The senior auror, Grunckle, is one of the ones giving Harry a dirty look, unaware of the angry glare Susan Bones is sending him. Ron tenses, subconsciously puffing up, and says something. Whatever he says causes Harry to blink and nod in agreement, turning back to Grunckle, the stressed and annoyed expression on his face melting away.

Hermione forces herself to focus on the discussion going on with the rest of the ward breaking team instead of worrying over her boys. Still, the look on Harry’s face in that instance gnaws at her. It’s a look Hermione hasn’t seen on his face in three years. Sometimes, it doesn’t feel like three years have passed since that fateful battle at Hogwarts. But, it has. Ron is officially an auror and has been for a year now. By this time next year, Hermione will have her Arithmancy and Charms Mastery, making her the youngest person to ever achieve two Masteries, and a year after that she’ll have her achieved Mastery in Ancient Runes.

It’s been a hard three years, but they’ve gotten through it. Hermione spends so much of her time studying that she sometimes forgets to take care of herself and Ron has been assigned cases that worry him enough he has actually forgotten to eat. These past three years, it has fallen to Harry to take care of them and the house. He cooks and he cleans, which is the only reason they don’t live in a pigsty and neither she nor Ron have starved to death. When Harry isn’t taking care of her or Ron, he can usually be found with Teddy.

It’s been a hard three years, but Hermione doesn’t think she’s ever seen Harry happier.

It’s not important. Hermione forces herself to shake thoughts of the past three years away and takes her place on Harry’s right. When everyone leaves and heads to the location, Hermione heart almost stops.

There are wards. Massive ones that will take hours to pull down. They have fifteen minutes before the moon allows the werewolves to transform. Hermione can feel the magic in the air from twenty feet away and as the fear trickles into the eyes of everyone else, she knows they can too.

“Hermione,” Harry’s voice is clear and unwavering, he’s studying the air in front of them carefully, wand flicking through the basic deciphering charms he’s picked up from helping her with her Charms and Arithmancy Masteries, “what are our options?” There’s something very comforting in the calmness in Harry’s voice. She’s not the only person who notices this because everyone seems to relax at once.

She pulls out her wand and begins deciphering the wards at a rapid pace. With a goal in mind, it’s easier to do this. To block out the world and let her mind tear into the problem at hand. “These wards are designed to let things out, but not to let anything in. Most likely, they’re planning to use the wards to buy them time for Greyback and the others to transform and exit the wards. It’ll take too long to dismantle the wards, and if we do, we’ll have to worry about Death Eaters exiting the park and wreaking havoc in the area.”

She pauses, crunches the numbers again when an anomaly pops up, and brush a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “Our best options are to either tear down the wards with brute force, stopping the Death Eaters before they can exit the wards—” There’s a chorus of grumbles about the impossibility of that idea. “—or rewrite the boundaries of the ward to make it a double boundary. Allowing them to exit the centre of the park, but not leave the confines of it.” A double barrier will work. It will be like a donut. The centre of the wards is an impenetrable force they can’t access, so they can only fight where the pastry would be. However, if the centre of the donut is an impenetrable wall and the pastry is the battlefield, Hermione will turn the pastry box containing the donut into another impenetrable wall. The Death Eaters may stay in the donut hole or they may come into the pastry, either way they will not leave the box.

“How long would it take you to rewrite the boundaries?” Ron asks, pulling away from his squad and conjuring a ribbon. He pulls her hair back, tying it into a ponytail, and Hermione spares a small smile for him. She normally wouldn’t bother with it, but she needs to see the results her wand provides and her bangs have gotten long enough to cover her eyes. She needs to get a haircut soon. Hermione has no idea how Harry can stand having his hair down to his shoulders and his bangs at nose level. But every mention of a haircut to him causes a grimace and a grumbled, “Aunt Petunia gave me a haircut once.” He won’t say anything else on the matter and all the conversation does is fuel Hermione’s burning need to hunt down the Dursleys and curse them.

“About fifteen minutes,” she answers, ignoring the shocked denials of the others in the ward breaking team.

“You have ten,” Harry informs her. He turns to everyone else, an annoyed scowl on his face. “You need to get to your positions now. If they try to stop Hermione from rewriting the wards, we need to be able to stop them.”

“Obviously, Potter,” Auror Grunkle snaps. Hermione barely spares a glance at the senior auror before snapping out orders to her team.

“Then stop standing around gawking and move,” Ron snarls.

The second the other aurors separate, heading to their designated area, the enemy begins spilling out from behind their wards. The ward team consists of ten people. All of them volunteers. Within the first four minutes of spell fire, five of them break, panicking and fleeing the scene. Two of them breakdown, too anxious about the situation and Hermione suspects one of them came here despite suffering from PTSD. Down to three people, herself included, Hermione is very annoyed when she realizes one of them is basically Cormac McLaggen, except without any skills or knowledge to back up his bragging. In the end, it boils down to her and a decrepit old man, Alfred Worthole, who thankfully is able to keep up with the speed Hermione’s mind works, despite the intense battlefield around them.

They get it done in nine minutes. The first three metres around the edge of the ward shatter, slivers of magic shooting out to reconfigure around the edge of the park. With that out of the way, Hermione stands back up, helping the old man to his feet, and ignores the distinctive green spell flying her way. The ground beside her erupts, shooting up and blocking the spell, exploding on impact. She doesn’t have time to thank Ron. They have roughly ten minutes until the werewolves begin to transform.

They don’t make it. Out of the twenty enemies, Ron, Harry, and their squad of fifteen—bringing the total of this team up to nineteen—they manage to subdue eleven of them. That would be a good thing, except for one thing. Just by looking at them, she can tell not a single one of them is a werewolf. Either the werewolves are attacking the others or they’re safely inside the barrier waiting to transform.

Hermione ducks under a spell, fires off a Disarming Charm verbally and non-verbally summons the wand of the person aiming curses at Harry. The disarming charm fails, as it was meant to, but the summoning charm works. She catches it with her free hand and snaps it between two fingers as its owner turns to face her. The face is familiar, despite the sheer rage on it when they watch Hermione drop the pieces of their wand to the ground, but it takes a second for Hermione to place it.

Theodore Nott.

Definitely not someone she was expecting to see. Not a good sign either. He was never suspected of being a Death Eater, but here he is, undeniably sided with them. He tries to apparate. But splinches himself trying to leave the area. The wards won’t let anyone leave this area until they’ve been pulled down. Hermione casually opens up a hole in the ground and kicks the lower half of Nott’s body into it, refilling the hole afterwards. A silver cage springs up around him from the ground and Hermione nods at Harry who runs past her.

“You mudblooded bitch!” Hermione silences Nott and binds his arms to his torso and moves on.

There’s a laugh, cruel and eager and Hermione dives out of the way of Greyback when he lunges at her. The second she gets back to her feet, she gets into the fighting stance she’d learned almost two years ago. So close to a full moon, there is no point in using magic on Greyback; however, Hermione knows there’s a fairly good chance she won’t be able to hit him hard enough to hurt.

Fenrir Greyback is not a martial artist or any type of trained fighter. When he lunges at her, Hermione can see exactly what he’s planning to do. She dodges out of the way of clawed fingertips, getting behind him, and lands a solid kidney punch. Greyback chuckles, “Gotten a little feistier since we last met, have you, girlie?”

It takes only a few seconds of analyzing for Hermione to confirm that she definitely did not do any sort of damage. Werewolves are sturdier than most people. Even if they weren’t minutes away from the full moon, Hermione doubts she’d be able to hit Greyback hard enough to do any damage. Harry, by virtue of being male, hits harder than her, but not by much. Which leaves her with one option.

“Ron, trade me!” she calls out, ignoring the horrified exclamations of “Greyback!” coming from some of the aurors. Ron and Harry are dueling seven Death Eaters far enough that Hermione hasn’t had to worry about too much spell fire from their fight, but still close enough that she doesn’t have to do much to get their attention. Ron twists, as Harry steps between him and their opponents and Hermione transfigures the ground into a glass wall to protect Ron as he appears with a crack beside her. Three spells hit the glass wall right aimed at Ron, but Hermione marvels as the tiny reflection ward she’d hidden in the wall causes them to bounce back at their castors. She apparates to Harry’s side, barely catching sight of Ron slugging Greyback in the face.

It takes a few minutes, but between the two of them they manage to take down all seven of them. They’re in the middle of restraining them and snapping their wands when she hears, “Merlin’s beard, Weasley!” She instinctively grasps Harry’s hand when they turn to look. Ron is fine. He’s delivering a brutal beating to Greyback and it occurs to Hermione that the speaker hadn’t been speaking out of fear and horror, but awe.

One of the many reasons wizards and witches fear werewolves is their physical strength. It is a side effect of the curse, made worse by the fact that if left to their own devices on full moons, werewolves will run around hunting humans, which is more exercise than most wizards and witches get in a month. Werewolves are physically stronger than wizards and witches. Their strength cannot be matched by anyone who is not a werewolf. This is one of the fundamental facts of the wizarding world. Yet, here is Ronald Bilius Weasley, a non-werewolf, beating the shit out of Fenrir Greyback, one of the most violent and powerful known werewolves of the past three centuries. For a few minutes everyone else on the battlefield stops, watching the fist fight between the two with a look of wonder.

Hermione shares an amused look with Harry who snickers, “What a behemoth,” gesturing with his wand at Ron who has managed to pin Greyback to the ground. With a swish of her wand, Hermione transfigures Greyback’s clothes into silver and buries his hands and feet beneath the ground. Crude, but effective.

Ron’s back on his feet, wiping some of the blood on his arms off. He throws a binding jinx at a Death Eater sneaking up behind one of his squad mates. “Pay attention to the fight!” The auror nods, a wide-eyed blushing blonde female who looks too much like Lavender for Hermione’s peace of mind.

Something to deal with later.

Greyback begins screaming and Hermione ignores it. She can’t imagine how painful being covered in silver is for him, but she currently lacks the empathy to care. It’s not until she hears the cracking of bones and glances at him that she realizes what’s happening. He’s transforming, but there’s still nine more people to subdue. Ron is sprinting over to them and Hermione transfigures the clothes of someone else writhing on the ground into silver, trusting Harry to do the same for the other person.

They may not have subdued everyone before the werewolves transformed, but they’ve at least managed to stop the werewolves. The rest of the Death Eaters should go down easy. The other werewolves must be dispersed amongst the battle and hopefully the other squads were smart enough to take them out while they were in the middle of their transformation.

Everything is going fine for the next few minutes until Hermione hears a telltale howl. She has to force herself to remember that there are probably just a couple of werewolves the other groups missed. It’s nothing to panic about. Then she hears another howl. And another. And another.

“Shit!” someone swears and Hermione glances up, towards the centre of the park. There are at least twenty werewolves stalking towards them. They varied in size, some of them small enough that they could only be children, while others were clearly old and struggling. Some of them walked with a limp, but others seemed far too jittery for what was going on.

It’s impossible.

At the height of Greyback’s army’s strength, it had only been thirty strong. Of that thirty, twelve had died during the Battle of Hogwarts, eight had died in Azkaban, and four are still in prison. They had all come here prepared to deal with six werewolves mixed in with the Death Eaters, which would be hard enough during a full moon. These werewolves shouldn’t be here. Hermione doubts there are even this many werewolves in the country. Lycanthropy is a rare disease for a reason. Most people don’t survive contracting it and those who did risked being put down by either the ministry or bigoted family members.

The werewolves lunge forward, and in the space it takes for several people to scream, their group of aurors who had come to stop the Death Eaters drops from nineteen to six as the others flee. Some try to apparate and splinch as a result; the Death Eaters laugh at those unlucky few until they try the same thing and get the same result. At the realization that they are just as trapped in here as the rest of them, the Death Eaters began to panic.

Harry, like a fucking idiot with a hero complex, apparates into the centre of the hoard, dragging the attention of every werewolf onto him and away from some of the screaming cowering cowards, both Death Eater and auror, desperately trying to scramble up trees while missing essential climbing limbs. Apparating inside the battlefield is fine, trying to apparate outside of it will lead to splinching. The splinching, Hermione knows she will have to argue, is not her fault. The anti-apparition ward the Death Eaters had drawn up had splinching firmly written in as a punishment for apparition. She didn’t exactly have time to write it out.

Everyone is trapped here. It’s a good thing they hadn’t opted tearing down the wards because they would have a massacre on their hands. Even if everyone dies here tonight, the werewolves still won’t be getting out.

Ron apparates to Harry’s side, covering his back with practiced ease. Hermione’s heart skips a beat at the sight of such instinctive loyalty. Leave it to Ron to follow Harry into the middle of a snarling pack of werewolves. As much as she wants to join them, Hermione knows her talents are put to better use elsewhere. Harry and Ron will buy her time and she needs to use that time to finish this.

She apparates to Alfred’s side, ignoring the sight of Grunkle’s torso and head lying on the ground near them. She doesn’t see the rest of his body anywhere, which means he must have put quite a bit of magic into his apparition if some of him actually left wherever he was before. “We need to put a stop of this,” she tells him. There are howls and screams coming from far off distance, which means there are werewolves everywhere.

This shouldn’t be possible. Where did they manage to amass all of these werewolves?

There needs to be a common denominator. Something that’s the same here and everywhere else. The trees? No, unless Hermione knows the exact location and shape of them, she doubts she’ll be able to use them to her advantage. Flowers and animals have the same problem. Honestly, the only things Hermione can trust with these criteria are the earth and air, which isn’t exactly useful.

Her eyes fall on Greyback, transformed and struggling to pull his limbs out of the earth, blood leaking out of his clothes and staining his fur.

“We’re going to transmute all of the ground around us into silver. We’ll do it in two stages, molten and solid.” Transmutation instead of Transfiguration means it’ll take less effort and magic to get the results they want, but the result is that they’re using Alchemy an esoteric branch of magic that Hermione doesn’t know much about. She’s read the basics, which means she has an idea of where to start, but she’s going to have to wing it and cheat with Arithmancy and Ancient Runes to get her desired result.

Alfred cocks a grey eyebrow at her. “You know alchemy.”

“No.” She carves an alchemical circle into the ground, conjuring the ward sequence in the air in front of them for comparison. “I only know the basics, so we’re going to have to get a little unorthodox with our methodology.”

Alfred chuckles softly, “I rather like unorthodox methods.” It’s a bit of relief when Alfred reveals a much deeper of alchemy than Hermione possesses. He’s able to keep up with her train of thought, argue some of her ideas as a waste and fine tune some of the ones he claims are brilliant. It takes forty minutes. Forty minutes of Harry, Ron, and three other aurors, each of them of old enough to have been aurors when Alastor Moody had been in the field in his prime, holding the werewolves at bay. Every time one of them gets too close for comfort, a blasting curse tears across the field to send it flying away.

Harry’s handiwork, no doubt.

More and more werewolves show up and join the fight. At the thirty minute mark, Hermione hears Susan Bones cry out, “Look, there are the others! We can link up with them!” There are sobs and shouts, most of them indecipherable beneath the sound of howls, snarls, and growls.

There are a couple of logistical problems that take them awhile to work around. The magic requirement to transmute this much ground into silver. Even using transmutation instead of transfiguration doesn’t completely solve this problem. In the end, Hermione crudely adds the alchemical circle to the wards, forcing them to divert power from the centre section of the barrier to the circle. It’s an ugly, blunt, brute force method that will collapse the inner set of wards the second Hermione activates the circle, but she doesn’t have time to figure out anything nicer and once the circle activates, it’ll finish the transmutation regardless of whether or not that part of the wards is up.

Problem two is making sure only the werewolves sink into the ground. The ground needs to be firm for everyone else. She taps into the wards again, rewriting them and forces several ancient runes into the scheme to have it differentiate between animals and human. And since she’s already making differentiations between people within the ward, she adds in a bit to separate Death Eaters from Aurors. Everyone who came here to stop this disaster will fall under the category of Law Human.

The last problem is actually doing the transmutation. Any good alchemist could probably get it done in five or six steps. Alfred explains what those steps would be and even suggests how to go about it. Hermione is not a good alchemist nor does she have the time to go about being one. She ignores three of the steps Alfred suggests and inserts seventeen different ones. It’s a lot more work, but the difference is that the transmutation should happen very quickly, instead of gradually and consistently like any good alchemist would aim for.

The end result is a truly hideous ward scheme. Any Ward Master would be horrified at what she and Alfred had done to a perfectly good ward. While Alfred looks at their work with a glowing pride, Hermione is more annoyed by how long this took. The battlefield is littered in corpses, strewn with blood and body parts. There are wolf corpses everywhere, a surprise to Hermione until she hears Harry cry out, “Sectumsempra!” She glances to the side and a werewolf that had been aiming for her throat lies cut in half.

It looks like Severus’ curse has been turned into a saving grace. Everyone’s using it, probably having picked it up in the heat of the battle from Harry and Ron. “Sectumsepra!” someone cries out. There’s a sharp crack and then Harry speaks, “It’s sectumSEMpra. The wand motion is a sharp slash.”

Or Harry’s going around the battlefield teaching it.

She activates the alchemical circle. In an instant, the ground almost melts. Then it changes colour. The werewolves began yipping, howling, scrambling around, and yanking their joints out the ground only to sink back in the second they put it back down to yank another limb out. Death Eaters yelp as every one on the ground finds themselves being dragged down into the earth until only their faces remain above.

It’s more of a shock when Auror Grunckle sinks in as well. And he’s not the only one. One fifth of the aurors in the area shriek when they’re dragged down.

Hermione swallows. All signs pointed to the Hogwarts prisoners escape being an inside job. She’d never imagined that some of the people responsible had been here, fighting at their side.

“Geez, Hermione,” Harry laughs, panting softly in comparison to most other people here, “what took you so long?” Ron is the only other person with breath to laugh. The difference between wizards who exercise and those who don’t never more apparent than in this moment. Susan is sprawled on her back, trembling from exhaustion as she watches them, shocked.

Hermione scowls at them, conjures an image of the abomination of the ward scheme she and Alfred had created. Harry examines it for a second, eyebrows raised. “How is this even functioning?” He looks more amused the longer he stares at it. “Did you break several laws of warding in order to work around actually breaking them?”

She smiles at him, proud at the way he’s able to make sense of some of her work. The time he spent as her helper has not been wasted. There’s a response on the tip of her tongue, but it transforms into a scream of “Harry!” when she sees something shifting behind Harry. It doesn’t take a genius to realize it’s a werewolf. She can’t get to him fast enough and Harry is blocking any clear shot she has of the werewolf. Still Hermione finds herself racing forwards with tears in her eyes.

The look of confusion on Harry’s face morphs into shock and understanding when Ron shoves him out of the way. The werewolf, in bloody silver clothes, sleeves and pant legs torn off, lands with a thump, teeth sunk in Ron’s neck. It doesn’t bother to tear out Ron’s throat, releasing him to turn on Harry. It’s not an act of mercy, but cruelty. They won’t be able to close the wounds before Ron bleeds out. This sort of act speaks to a rationality that werewolves shouldn’t have during a full moon.

Wolfsbane.

Harry is pushing himself up, staring at Ron in horror. He keeps mouthing something to himself, but Hermione is too far away to make it out. Her wand is in her hand and she throws a blasting curse on Greyback—it has to be Greyback, Hermione can’t imagine anyone else pulling off this feat—and curses when Greyback dodges it, weaving around to lunge at Harry again who hasn’t stopped staring at Ron. She throws off three more curses, each one forces Greyback away from his target just a little more.

She takes another step and the ground slides out from under her, sending her face first into a bloody mud puddle and her wand flying from her hand. Greyback lunges for Harry, still half raised in shock, and Hermione can’t do anything but scream.

Ron goes from lying on his back to tackling Harry so fast, Hermione swears she never even saw him move despite watching them. Greyback’s claws get him in the face and Hermione swallows back another scream when her boyfriend drops down on top of Harry. She doesn’t have time for screaming.

She summons her wand to her hand. Greyback is preparing for his next attack, Ron is down, and Harry is clearly still in shock. The other aurors have all collapsed from exhaustion and Hermione is peripherally aware of the fact that Susan is struggling to point her wand at Greyback. “Accio Fenrir Greyback!” The werewolf flies away from her boys, but Hermione doesn’t want him to come all the way to her. Another spell causes a silver chain to erupt from the ground, wrap around Greyback’s neck and stop his momentum, resulting in him harshly hitting the ground.

Now would be a good time to hit Greyback with the Severing Curse, but Hermione doesn’t have enough magic to use it. She’s been doing heavy warding for most of this battle. A job originally intended to be done by ten people had instead been done by two. Rewriting such large wards that had covered such a large area has left her exhausted.

Greyback snarls, mouth bleeding and Hermione knows that there’s too much blood to all be from Ron.

Not important right now.

“Episkey!” Harry cries and Hermione stamps down the urge to tell him that spells a terrible choice for several reasons. Primarily it’s one of the weakest healing spells he could use. And more importantly, it’s primary use is to realign cartilage. She knows he’s used the Straightening Boon before for other injuries, but none of those were ever the result of a powerful curse like that in the saliva of werewolves.

Not important right now.

Greyback is gnawing at the silver chain, ignoring the way it must burn at his sensitive mouth. Silver is a soft metal; gold is barely softer. His jaws are powerful enough he might break those chains. Which means Hermione must kill him before he manages to escape. She doesn’t have enough magic for any dark magic that would damage him effectively and most of the lighter spells won’t do anything while he’s transformed. She strengthens the chains, tightening the bit around his neck for good measure, and summons Greyback to her again.

He moves the entire length of the chain before he runs out of slack and his momentum suddenly stops. He howls, the sound cut off slightly as the chain continues to tighten. She banishes him, sends him flying the other way, watching the process repeat itself. She’ll keep doing this until either he asphyxiates or his neck snaps.

Whichever happens first.

When she summons Greyback for the eighth time, she’s not expecting his body to separate from his head, landing in a bloody pile in front of her. It’s a messy gruesome death, but with Harry’s desperate cries of “Episkey” echoing in her head, she can’t bring herself to care.

The stench of blood fills her nose, but unlike the many other times Hermione’s smelt blood on the battlefield, Hermione finds herself shying away from it, stomach painfully convulsing. Ron is unconscious, head pillowed in Harry’s lap, he’s pale and shaking, blood leaking down his neck and the sides of his face, staining his skin. He has four heavily bleeding claw marks stretching from the left side of his chin up to the centre of his forehead. There are two sets of holes on either side of his Adam’s apple because Greyback got him right in the centre of his neck.

It’s a pity Hermione can’t kill him a second time.

“Episkey!” Harry cries again, wand hovering over the holes in Ron’s throat. Now would be a good time to tell Harry he’s using the worst possible spell for this.

The holes begin to shrink.

The process is painfully slow, but the progress is noticeable. Choking back tears of relief, she understands why the others are quiet, why they’re watching Harry like he’s a God performing a miracle. Magic begins pouring off Harry when he casts the spell. Waves of condensed magic thick enough to be visible to the naked eye. Hermione can taste it on her tongue, sweet and smooth; feel it on her skin, silky and warm; hear it in the air, clear and vibrant.

Harry loves Ron, Hermione has always known this, but here, in this moment, with Harry’s magic swirling and spiraling around everyone, a frenetic ceremonial dance that prays for Ron to survive, she’s hit with how important Ron is to Harry. How important she is to Harry. His magic is holding her hand, sobbing in her ear, waving a hand in front of her face, pleading with her to help. To do everything she can to fix this.

Ron gasps, the sound wet and broken, as he chokes on his own blood. Hermione is moving, pulling out a small pouch of dittany mixed with powdered silver. She’d packed it more as a necessary precaution than anything. She hadn’t expected she would be using it. Not on Ron or Harry. Maybe on one of the less experienced aurors, but not on either of her boys.

The wounds seal under her attention, but Ron is still unconscious.

Harry carefully moves and Hermione takes his place, squeezing his hand gently as he begins to walk around the group. Using the same terrible spell to heal their wounds.

“That,” Alfred murmurs, voice amused as he inspects the wounds on Ron’s neck, “is not what that spell is for.”

“Well,” Susan chirps, a slight awe to her voice as she forces her limbs up, “I don’t think Harry’s ever actually cared about little things like that.”

Alfred snorts at those words and Hermione is unable to resist the urge to get closer to Ron, ignoring the banter between the rest of their group. To run her hands through Ron’s hair because he’s still here. He’s here and he’s alive and she fights down the tears that try to spill out.

She almost lost him. She almost lost him because—she stops and thinks about it. She has no idea what had sent her sprawling to the ground. When she looks back to where she had been standing to deal with Greyback, she notices the arm on the ground.

Lovely, the cowards who had tried to escape had almost gotten Ron and Harry killed.

It takes ten minutes for Harry to finish using the worst possible healing spell for the situation to adequately heal the rest of the aurors still alive and with them and get them back on their feet. They need to check for survivors, but even with everyone able to stand, there’s still no way they’ll be able to help any survivors, let alone deal with anyone else who escaped the effects of the ward Hermione and Alfred had drawn up.

If Greyback managed it, despite having started off with limbs buried in the ground, then there is a good chance others had done the same.

“We need reinforcements,” one of the elderly aurors announces. “With the shape we’re in we won’t be able to do much else.” He spares a look around the area, a frown etched into his lips, “Besides, we need a healer. Now.”

There’s a soft chorus of agreement and Hermione hates to be the bearer of bad news, but someone has to fill them in. “The outer wards are still up, no one’s getting in or out until they come down and I won’t have the magic to work on them for awhile.”

“Then I’ll tear them down,” Harry declares, wand in hand and back already turned to them. He’s heading back towards where Hermione had worked on the Alfred, the area where the wards are strongest by virtue of being in Hermione’s line of sight when she rewrote the wards.

The area on the opposite side of the park is the weakest and Hermione is in the process of standing up so she can inform him when Alfred stops her. “Now, now, dear, there’s no reason to stop him.”

“That’s the strongest section of the wards,” she reminds him.

“I know.” There’s a twinkle in Alfred’s eye as he watches Harry, the sort of twinkle that comes from solving a particularly difficult puzzle.

Hermione doesn’t have time for his nonsense. She’s about to call for Harry, the breath already in her lungs, when the first explosion hits. From over a hundred metres away, Hermione is knocked on her ass from the backlash of Harry’s Exploding Charm. “Merlin’s beard,” Susan laughs, watching Harry with a giant grin on her face.

It takes Harry three hits. Only three hits to tear down some of the strongest wards Hermione has come across in a very long time. He sends off three patronuses. One Hermione knows is heading to Saint Mungo’s, the other will be heading to the DMLE.

The third one must be heading to Molly and Arthur.

He walks back to them, sitting down beside her and staring at Ron with a look Hermione remembers all too well. Guilt. Self-loathing. Grief. The same agonized expression he wore throughout the entirety of the Horcrux Hunt. Hermione wraps an arm around his shoulders and pulls him closer. When she has him tucked into her side, she presses a kiss to his forehead and grabs his hand, threading their fingers together. She leaves their joint fingers resting on Ron’s chest, gently rising and falling with every breath Ron takes. “He’s okay, Harry. He’s going to be okay.”


	3. Chapter 3

It’s been two days since the attack. They’ve gotten some answers. The number of werewolves they had faced were a result of Death Eaters kidnapping homeless muggles and unattended children. They’d created their army last month by carefully having the werewolves bite a muggle and sealing the wound with dittany and powdered silver immediately. Or by making a small incision and applying a bit of werewolf saliva that had been previously harvested for this battle.

Of the forty muggles kidnapped, thirty died on the battlefield. Nine more died from the strain of their first transformation. The only survivor of the lot is a small toddler. He’s a muggleborn wizard and that seems to be the only reason he’s survived where so many others died. The ministry is currently searching for his parents, what will happen to him after that is undecided, but at least he’ll be reunited with his parents.

As for the Death Eaters, thirty of them died, unable to escape from the werewolves after they’d splinched themselves. Fifteen have died from injuries caused while they were fighting. Four have contracted lycanthropy. Theodore Nott is the only one to escape without serious injury. His lower body had been trapped underground and his upper body had been protected by the silver cage. He will continue to enjoy his health and wellbeing from Azkaban.

Their side hadn’t faired much better. The ward team had consisted of ten volunteers. Five of them fled before the wards had been rewritten. Two of them had breakdowns on the field and while one of them managed to climb a tree for safety during the massacre, the other had been torn apart. The Cormac McLaggen of the group has contracted lycanthropy. She and Alfred are the only ones unharmed. The aurors fared even worse. Sixty aurors had been sent to subdue the Death Eaters and half of them were dead. Ten more are expected to succumb to their injuries by the end of the week. Ten of them, including Harry and Susan, will make a full recovery. The remaining ten have lycanthropy; it’s expected only two or three of them will survive their first transformation.

Ron is among the ones expected to die. He still hasn’t woken up. The unconsciousness has the healers worried, it’s unnatural and, though it hasn’t been said aloud, Hermione knows the healers think it’s Harry’s fault. She knows Harry thinks it’s his fault.

There’s a second source of magic running through Ron’s blood. It’s fighting the lycanthropy curse with every breath Ron draws. It fights every spell that hits Ron, including the ones to spell food into his stomach. They haven’t been able to get any food into Ron and they’ve barely managed to keep him hydrated. If something doesn’t change soon, Ron will die from malnourishment.

She has an idea. The healers are dealing with Ron’s situation like any witch or wizard would. With magic. Since magic has failed to help Ron with the most basic of his problems, he’s been deemed a lost cause. But muggles have a method. They must have some sort of method for dealing with comatose patience, some way of providing nutrients when the patient can’t eat. They’ll have to hire a nurse or something to look after Ron, but it’s fine. Hermione knows Harry will gladly convert his entire fortune into pounds if it means, Ron will survive.

But that means she has to talk to Harry. He’s sitting beside Ron’s bed, holding his hand, that same distraught expression from three years ago glued to his face. Hermione sits on the other side of the bed, Ron’s other hand grasped tightly between her hands.

She wants to make Harry feel better, but she’s not sure how. Making Harry laugh when he’s miserable has always been Ron’s area of expertise. It doesn’t help that she understands how he feels. Because if she’d just been faster with the wards, if she hadn’t tripped while Greyback was attacking Harry, if she’d done something—anything—while Ron was still awake, maybe he wouldn’t be in a coma now.

It’s so damn hard to remain positive while Ron is like this. But, she needs to talk to Harry, explain that they haven’t exhausted their options to help Ron. And, if she’s going to do this, she must do it while Molly is gone, dragged out of the hospital by Bill and distracted by Victoire, the newest addition to the Weasley family. She was born a week ago and seems to be the only one capable of distracting Molly from Ron’s hospitalization.

Hermione sighs softly, brushing some of Ron’s hair out of his face. He’s so pale, the colour from his freckles seems to have been bleached out, but his face is peaceful, marred only by the scars from Greyback’s claws. His wounds are the only ones among those suffering from werewolf inflicted injuries that have fully healed. It’s a miracle according to the healers who had poked and prodded the area to try and discover the reason for it. They had only stopped once Susan had pointed out it was probably a result of Harry using the Straightening Boon to heal Ron’s injuries. They’d questioned Harry about it. Or at least they tried to.

Harry hasn’t spoken since he sent off his patronuses two days ago.

He hasn’t eaten. He hasn’t drank anything. He hasn’t showered, relying solely on a self-cleansing charm. Hermione’s not even sure if he’s gone to the bathroom or if he’s just been vanishing his bodily waste the second he’s aware of it. The healers had not been happy that they couldn’t vanish Ron’s waste, too much of Harry’s magic running through it, fighting off their every spell, and refused to come anywhere near him if any of it was present outside his body. The task of keeping Ron sanitary has fallen on her, Harry, and Molly. Not a difficult task, but completely ridiculous in Hermione’s opinion.

It reminds Hermione so starkly of her muggle roots. She can’t imagine a doctor or nurse who would shy away from feces, blood, or urine. But, that is a group of people who don’t have a choice, but to directly deal with bodily waste. Wizards and witches have magic. They don’t have to deal with waste if they don’t want to. They can remove it from the body without ever having to see or smell it. Harry understands her confusions. He may have abandoned his muggle roots the second he could, but that doesn’t change the fact that for roughly sixteen years, the muggle world had been where he’d unwillingly lived. The Dursleys would not have been able to justify taking one child to the doctors and not the other. Not in a small town like Surrey where everyone knew each other.

She runs her thumb over Ron’s knuckles, thumb catching in the ridges between each finger. “I’m going to need your vault key.” Harry looks up at her, tearing his eyes away from Ron’s sleeping face for the first time. “The healers can’t give him nutrients because his body is rejecting their magic.” Harry’s eyes darken at the reminder. Hermione isn’t trying to make him feel worse, but this is Harry, and if there’s a way for him to blame himself for a bad situation, he will find it. “Muggles keep people in comas alive all the time. And they can’t spell food into their stomachs. We may have to check Ron into a muggle hospital, but we may be able to keep him home and hire someone else to check on him periodically. Either way it’s going to cost a lot of pounds, so I’m going to set up a muggle bank account for you.”

Because even though I’ve been nagging you for a year and a half to do it, you haven’t.

She leaves that part unsaid, the knot in her chest loosening at the tiny, almost imperceptible, smile Harry gives her. Ever since she had signed them up for activities in the muggle world, Hermione has been nagging Harry to create a muggle bank account. It would be far more convenient for them to pay for lessons with a debit card instead of stopping at Gringotts, a timely affair that requires them to give the goblins a week of notice for their arrival, converting galleons to cash, and then having to count pounds each time they pay. Hermione’s positive their muggle landlord thinks Harry is paying him with blood money.

Which isn’t completely wrong. The war against Voldemort sent a minimum of ten different families into extinction. At least half the people who perished during the war left something to Harry. An old muggleborn woman who had married into a wealthy pureblood family had been the last of the family. When she passed away seven months ago, she left everything she owned to Harry. Everything consisted of 750 million galleons, five summer homes, a villa in Paris, Eeylops Owl Emporium, and a stable full of Abraxan. Harry had given the Abraxan to Hagrid, left Eeylops to Percy, the business-oriented member of Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes, to manage and considered the issue no longer his problem.

George was pretty happy to have another source of inspiration for his products and another location to sell them.

Harry is rich. And he’ll most likely continue have random bursts of income until everyone who had lived through the second blood war dies. Just like he’ll continue to receive royalties for every bottle of Sleekeazy sold. His life would be so much easier if he just opened a muggle bank account. There isn’t a reason for him not to. Harry went to primary school, he exists in the muggle government records. The only problem is those records are with the Dursleys.

Hermione’s hasn’t forced the issue beyond nagging because she knows Harry hasn’t wanted to contact the Dursleys and Hermione knows it’s not her place to force him. However, if they’re going to be dealing with frequently paying a nurse or doctor to take care of Ron then they are going to need a fast way to transfer funds. Going to Gringotts each time will be too time consuming and Hermione is not about to put Harry’s money into her bank account, regardless of how often he makes the suggestion.

She hasn’t bothered to change banks since she setup her account with her parents and as the bank owner is friends with her parents, she knows the news will get back to them. Not that it won’t get back to them when Hermione opens Harry’s account. God, they’ll probably be waiting for her the second she finishes opening the account. She’d go to a different bank, but the spells she’s going to have to use on the banker to get them to set up an account without Harry present work best when the castor has a rapport with the victim.

Once upon a time, Hermione had cherished every second she had with her parents. Those days began to fade away after her fourth year at Hogwarts. She’d been so worried about Harry that every day spent away from him had felt like a punishment. Her parents hadn’t understood the change in her. They hadn’t tried to understand. Hermione hadn’t spent most of the summer with the Order of the Phoenix with their blessing that year; instead, she’d snuck out of the house in the middle of the night and taken the Knight Bus to meet Ron at the Burrow the day the Weasleys were scheduled to head to Grimmauld Place.

That was the night their relationship began to deteriorate. There were a lot of angry letters sent her way, most of them through Hedwig who Harry had always allowed Hermione and her parents to use for communication, that only got angrier when Hermione didn’t return home for Christmas as they had demanded. Things may have gotten better, maybe she would have been able to come to an understanding, but then they walked into Voldemort’s trap. Hermione had been severely injured and the conflict between Hermione and her parents had shifted in tone.

After the debacle in the Department of Mystery, the burn Hermione had suffered extended from her chest area around to her back. She’d needed a special cream to help it heal, and as she would need help applying it to areas she couldn’t reach, her parents were pulled aside, thankfully after Harry had already left, and the situation was explained to them. Hermione isn’t sure she’ll ever forgive Dumbledore for that. It was the right thing for him to do in regards to a student under his care being injured, but it was the wrong thing to do in regards to calming down her parents. All it did was give them a different source to turn their anger and frustration on.

Harry.

They blamed Harry for everything. Every time Hermione refused to listen to them, every time she tried to argue her point, they took it as more proof that Harry had corrupted her. They claimed that before Harry, Hermione had been a good, rule-abiding, girl who followed instructions and respected authority.

They weren’t wrong.

Before Harry, Hermione had never questioned adults. She had never bothered to think for herself or make opinions that contradicted those in charge. Her intelligence had been wasted on her during the first twelve years of her life. The first time Hermione ever truly made a contradictory decision was in her third year when she decided not to report Remus to anyone. He was a werewolf and ministry laws dictated that if you know of a werewolf, you are required by law to report them, so they may be added to the Werewolf Registry. She knew this. She did the research the second she realized what he was.

It’s terrifying to think that a year before that she might have reported him. Two years before that she definitely would have. She would have ruined a man’s life because it was the rules. Harry had been the one to teach her that sometimes the rules can go fuck themselves. Hermione’s always known she has issues with rules. Sometimes she cherry-picks them. Deciding which ones she’ll follow and which ones she’ll ignore, going through extreme lengths to justify breaking rules, like the time she set Severus’ robes on fire or when she brewed Polyjuice Potion in their second year, but it used to make her feel so guilty.

Now, when Hermione does something highly unethical, she doesn’t really care. She’s going to have to use magic on the people in the bank to make sure they accept the deposit she puts into Harry’s account. And she’ll probably have to use magic on anyone sent to investigate where it came from. It doesn’t bother her. Not in the way it would have a decade ago.

The summer after fifth year, she had snuck out of her home again to make sure she saw Harry the second Dumbledore had taken him from the Dursleys. That was the year she had begun to stop responding to her parents’ letters. It was a slow gradual change. It might not have gotten as bad as it had, but in one of their letters, they demanded to know why she couldn’t be more like her cousin, Laura.

Laura is the kind of girl other girls hate. Hermione used to hate her. She’s pretty, she’s athletic, she’s smart, she’s popular. Her parents dote on her, brag about her every accomplishment. Before Hogwarts, their parents had constantly been in competition, using their children as a measuring stick for who is a better parent. Laura was on a soccer team, so Hermione had been forced onto a swim team. Laura took up photography, so Hermione had to take up painting. Laura started ballet, so Hermione had to start piano lessons. Laura had so many friends and she was just so popular, but Hermione was a “bossy know-it-all” no one particularly liked.

Hermione used to hate her. She had felt like she could never compete with a girl who seemed to have it all. Hermione’s grades were better, but not by much. In the end, the difference between them had always boiled down to their friends and troublemaking. Hermione had none; Laura had many. Hermione never got into trouble; Laura got into less trouble than a normal child, but still too much for her to compete with Hermione for a good behaviour award. They had been trapped in a stalemate.

When the Grangers had been informed that she’s a witch, her parents had been ecstatic. Her magical blood had seemed to be the thing that would finally put Hermione in the spotlight and make her the winner in their unofficial contest. And then they’d been informed about the Statute of Secrecy. Her cousin’s family could never be told about Hermione’s status.

Suddenly, the Grangers could not compete. Hermione’s school was a secret and her grades were in subjects that couldn’t be talked about. She had to stop taking her extracurricular activities, not that Hermione had ever cared for any of them, and the only friends their daughter ever mentioned were two boys. She had still been expected to keep up with her muggle studies, and as she has always genuinely loved learning, that had never been a problem. The only problem was that her parents couldn’t brag about test scores and report cards. They can’t brag about her A-levels.

Hermione hasn’t even bothered to tell them she’s gotten her A-levels. Her results were very good, especially considering how much of a formal muggle education she has. She did have to use magic to get them, though. Skipping taking classes and only writing the final exam.

The competition with Laura was eventually what led to the current state of their relationship. Summer after sixth year, her parents had dragged her to a family gathering, a last-ditch attempt to prevent her from sneaking out in the middle of the night to rejoin her friends. They hadn’t known Hermione had her apparition license by that point and she hadn’t felt the need to inform them. She’d spent the entire time she was their snappish with everyone who spoke to her, too worried about Harry to care about how the rest of her family perceived her. Laura and her parents had been thrilled; her parents had been enraged.

As the night grew closer, Hermione had found out the point of the family gathering: An intervention. For her. They began by talking about how worried they were for her. How she had changed. She was becoming someone unrecognizable. They loved her and only wanted what was best for her. They just wanted her to go back to happy girl she used to be. The girl from before Harry.

Hermione will die before she goes back to being a spineless, pusillanimous, people-pleasing, brown-nosing, mindless drone. And she told them that. Hermione liked who she was. She liked who she had become because of Harry; he had taught her to stand up for herself and for those who could not stand up for themselves. She would never allow anyone to make her do something she doesn’t want to do nor would she allow them to turn her into someone she didn’t want to be. They weren’t happy when she told them that. They were less happy when Hermione had turned her back on them and walked out the door. She had noticed at the time, Laura had been watching her with a strange look in her eyes, but Hermione hasn’t seen her since, so she has no idea what it was about.

After she’d left her intervention, she had gone to Grimmauld Place, spending most of her time in the Black Library researching the spell she used to temporarily erase her parents’ memory. After three weeks of study, she’d returned home, ignoring her parents’ angry lecture of how she’d embarrassed them and how they’ve never been more ashamed of her in their life, memory-charmed them, and sent them on their way to Australia.

In the end, Hermione knows the only reason she had bothered to retrieve them was because she knew her extended family would have noticed them gone after too long. Her parents had been extremely happy with their lives in Australia, happier than Hermione had seen them in a very long time. They’d been less happy when Hermione restored their memories. She’d given the option to stay or return home, even going as far as to offer to permanently erase their memories of her. They’d angrily returned home and things have never been the same.

It’s not that Hermione doesn’t understand why they’re upset. She does. She is their only daughter and she spent a good chunk of her teenaged years doing incredibly dangerous things and hiding it from them. In their own way, they had been looking out for her and trying to keep her safe. But they’d never been interested in Hermione’s perspective on the situation. They’d chosen to never understand why Hermione loved Harry and Ron as much as she did. Not once had they ever offered to host Harry or Ron for a day or an outing. They often shut the idea down before Hermione could even finish raising it. So, no. her parents have no idea why she loves them so much that when her parents forced her to choose between them or her boys, she’d picked her boys without a second thought.

And she will always choose them, until her dying breath.

Hermione isn’t sure if things will ever be okay between her and her parents. She only ever makes attempts to reconcile with them because she knows how terrible Harry feels over her family situation, how he blames himself. Ridiculous. Harry had never forced her to choose between him and her parents.

And even if he had, Hermione knows she would have picked him in an instant.

Hermione leans down and presses a kiss to Ron’s lips, soft and gentle, unable to stop herself from worrying that she will hurt him if she’s not careful. She takes a slow breath, trying to draw as much strength as she possibly can, and lets go of his hand. Walking around the bed to hug Harry from behind. She holds him for awhile, knows that he needs it even if he won’t say anything. “He’s going to be okay,” she reassures him. Slowly, over the course of ten minutes, Harry relaxes into her hold.

“‘Mi?” She’s so happy to hear Harry’s voice, she almost bursts into tears. Holding back the sobs that want to escape, she presses a kiss to the top of Harry’s head. “I don’t want to be an auror.” He sounds devastated. As if he’s broken some sacred law. As if he’s telling Hermione something she doesn’t want to hear. As if he’s telling her a massive failing.

“I know,” she murmurs, running her fingers through his hair. “Ron and I have always known.”

“The DMLE is severely understaffed,” He’s tensing back up and his tension leaks into Hermione.

She knows exactly where her self-sacrificing idiot is going with this.

“Ron will kill you if you use his injuries as an excuse to martyr yourself.” Harry tenses in her arms and Hermione can already hear the argument he’s preparing to unleash. “You don’t get to blame yourself for what happened to Ron. It wasn’t your fault.” Harry flinches, a wounded sound slips from his lips, but Hermione keeps going. “He made the choice to place himself between you and Greyback. You don’t get to take that away from him.”

“He—”

“Loves you. He loves you enough he’ll die to keep you safe and I would do the same.”

“You can’t do that!” Harry pulls away from her, stands, and turns to face her. “You can’t throw your lives away for me!”

“And why not? You do the same thing. You always put the lives of everyone around you ahead of your own.”

Harry’s crying, silent tears sliding down his face, and Hermione can’t decide whether or not she’s surprised by the sight. To date, she has only seen Harry cry two other times. The first time was when she had slipped into the boys’ dorm after his name had come out of the Goblet of Fire. At the time, he’d been devastated by Ron’s refusal to believe he hadn’t put his name in the cup. The second time had been after Ron had left during the Horcrux Hunt. That time, instead of comforting him, Hermione had sobbed with him, arms around each other the entire night.

“A long time ago, Ron and I decided that since you never put yourself first, we will. We vowed to spend the rest of our lives looking after you because we know that you’ll never take care of yourself when you have the choice to take care of someone else.” She crosses the distance between them and pulls Harry back into her arms, kisses him on the forehead, over his symbolic scar. “I won’t let you become an auror, not when I know it will make you miserable. Ron would never forgive me. If anyone tries to force you down that path, I will cut them down where they stand.”

She means it. She means it completely and remorselessly because Harry is one of the most important people in her life and she will kill to protect him. There’s a wetness seeping into her clothing where Harry’s face rests, glasses pushed up to the top of his head, but eventually, Harry hugs back, squeezing her tightly.

“I’m certain it won’t get as far as that,” Kingsley says. He’s standing in the doorway and Hermione can feel the way Harry tenses back up at the intrusion. He presses his face further into her shoulder, hiding as best he can, and Hermione throws an annoyed glare over her shoulders wondering if she’s about to be forced to kill the Minister of Magic, which would be a shame because Kingsley is a very good minister. “I came looking for recruitments for the auror department,” he holds up his hands innocently before Hermione has a chance to hex him, “but seeing as I would rather not be cut down where I stand, I’ll make a different suggestion.” Hermione doesn’t cut him down, a courtesy she only provides because of their former acquaintance. “Harry, you should put your skills to use under Richter Belmont.”

The name is familiar, but she can’t exactly place it. “And who is Richter Belmont?”

“The person who granted Remus his Mastery.”

Harry’s head raises, giving her a look that takes Hermione a second to decipher. “Any chance you can write a letter of introduction for us?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may be thinking, "Did I just wait X amount of time for a chapter of exposition and introspection?" The answer is yes, yes, you did.


	4. Chapter 4

Ron is in bed, as unresponsive as he’s been for the past three weeks. At least he’s home. He’s home and in bed, which is more than Hermione could have hoped for if he was still in the care of St. Mungo’s healers. Finding someone on short notice who has both the required training and the necessary experience to care for Ron, because neither she nor Harry feel comfortable allowing someone without years of experience be responsible for Ron’s wellbeing, hadn’t been an easy task.

Molly hadn’t been pleased with them, or more specifically with her, for taking Ron out of St. Mungo’s and leaving him in the care of muggles. When she had seen Ron’s feeding tube being carefully inserted through his nose, she’d broken down. Words had been said, curses had been thrown, tears had been shed. In the end, Arthur had pulled Molly aside and talked her out of her grief-induced rage. He’d been too late, though. The damage had already been done.

Harry is avoiding her.

Harry who has always been Molly’s biggest fan is going out of his way to avoid her. He’s gone as far as disapparating from the apartment, in the middle of his shower, to stay away from her when she comes to check on Ron.

It’s hard to watch. Every time Molly hears the sharp crack of Harry’s disapparition, her entire face crumbles. Regret is etched into every line of her weary face.

Hermione would like to help; she would love to fix things so that they can go back to how they used to be. But this isn’t something she knows how to fix. Ron has always been the link between the three of them and other people. He’s the only one with any sort of people skills out of all of them. Hermione knows people tend to find her intimidating, but she just can’t be bothered to tone down her intensity to put them at ease. It had been a defence mechanism of a too smart child too used to being hurt by other children. If the other children didn’t want to be around her outside of group projects and classwork because her intelligence and attitude bothered them, then they were not the type of people she wanted to befriend.

It was a stubborn method, a self-righteous and arrogant way to avoid taking responsibility for her behaviour. She’d blamed the other children for not wanting to be her friend. Not her bratty, know-it-all tendencies or her patronizing habit of talking down to her peers. Ironically, her self-centred decision had paid off in the end.

Because it led her to Harry and Ron.

Two people who aren’t bothered by her intelligence or her need to blurt out information that no one asked her for. It was for them that Hermione learned to curb her habit of talking down on people. She had hated how angry Ron would get whenever she did it to him, how Harry would give her a neutral look and keep her at a distance.

That’s always been how Harry’s dealt with people. He might laugh and smile with others, but that doesn’t change the fact that Harry is wary of people until he gets to know them. He hadn’t stopped watching her with apprehensive eyes until after his first quidditch match and he found out that she had set Snape’ robes on fire. It wasn’t until the culmination of the Philosopher Stone mishap, when she’d sent him off to face Voldemort with nothing more than a hug and the information that she thought he was a good wizard, that he let her past the final barriers.

That’s the way things have always been for the three of them. She scares people off, Harry keeps them at a distance, and Ron, as the only one competent enough to deal with other people, acts as a bridge and gatekeeper for others.

Without Ron to act as a social buffer, Hermione worries that she’ll make the Molly situation worse.

Harry lies on Ron’s right side, watching her strip out of her clothes. Part of Hermione feels like she should be embarrassed to be watched as she changes clothes, but that part of her is buried beneath the weight of her experience Horcrux Hunting. Harry and Ron had both seen her in varying stages of undress and she had seen the same of them. When she turns around, her nightgown swirling around her feet, Harry isn’t watching her anymore; he’s resting his head on Ron’s chest, fingers tapping to the steady beating of Ron’s heart.

She settles down on Ron’s left, tries to ignore the pale, almost grey tone of Ron’s skin. Harry looks guilty, pulling away from Ron, but she stops him with a firm hand on his head. Harry needs the reassurance of Ron’s heartbeat in his ears; she only needs to have both of her boys in her sight. She presses a kiss to Ron’s temple and gently runs her fingers through Harry’s hair, massaging his scalp. Harry sighs, eyes drooping closed, and Hermione feels herself drifting off.

“What are we going to do?” Harry asks, voice whisper soft. His eyes are still closed, but the fingers which had been tapping to Ron’s heartbeat are now clutching the material of Ron’s shirt. “The ministry...” he trails off, eyes finally opening.

Hermione swallows, mouth suddenly very dry. The ministry is in disarray, split down the middle over what to do about the new werewolf aurors. In a normal situation, every auror who had been converted would be added to the Werewolf Registry and fired from the force, their lives effectively over. In this situation, the auror force is severely understaffed, in a worse position than it had been when the war had ended.

The auror force is just as divided as the ministry. Those who had been part of the battle insist that the infected members continue their jobs as if nothing has changed. Those who had not been a part of it wanted them gone, insisting that they were too dangerous to be around normal people. The less prejudiced of the second fraction claimed that werewolves are incredibly aggressive and the high-stress situations aurors encounter will only exacerbate their aggressive tendencies. And there were those aurors who weren’t prejudiced, but opportunists; the ones who only wanted the new werewolves gone because then their job positions become available.

It’s not a good situation for anyone.

At the rate the conflict is escalating, Ron will awake from his coma to find himself unemployed. There’s no way in hell Hermione will allow that. Ron loves his job. He worked hard to get it and Hermione won’t be allowing anyone to take it from him because he got injured in the line of duty.

“We’ll stop them,” she promises Harry.

“They’re blocking our every attempt.” Harry grumbles, his grip tightening on Ron’s shirt. “They’ve shut down every one of Kingsley’s attempts to mitigate the dangers of a sudden influx of werewolves and seem determined to make the situation as unstable possible. It’s almost like they want—” Harry stops himself, eyes darting over to her, silently begging her to deny his previous train of thought.

Kingsley suggested a fund be created to help provide Wolfsbane for any werewolf that does not have access to it. The ministry claimed that such a project would be too expensive and if he really wanted to improve the standard of living of their citizens, they should put that money to use at Azkaban, so the prisoners could live more humanely. Kingsley tried to compromise by making the fund specifically for the aurors who had been turned as a result of the battle. The opposite side claimed that if they were going to be using the money on those affected by the battle that it should be aimed to compensate those most affected by it: the sympathetic families of the ones who caused the tragedy. Kingsley refused that idea and suggested that they use the money to fund research on the Wolfsbane potion in order to make it a cheaper and more accessible option. His opposition said that was a preposterous suggestion and that funding research on dementors and how to dampen their effect on wizards made more sense.

It’s frustrating. It was bad enough when Death Eaters had full control of the ministry, but the war is over and the situation has barely improved. Many Death Eaters had been removed from their post, but that had just left them open for sympathizers. People who supported Voldemort’s agenda, but had never committed a crime, had resumed the work of their predecessors.

This time around, they are trying to camouflage the role Death Eaters had played and are doing everything they can to vilify werewolves. Unfortunately, they are succeeding. Anti-werewolf sentiments are the strongest they have ever been in the past three centuries. Many died during that last attack, so the public is afraid, lashing out recklessly. The ministry is doing everything they can to guarantee that any attacks are directed at werewolves, not the Death Eaters.

Dealing with this would be hard enough with the three of them working together, but it won’t be the three of them. Ron is unconscious and trapped in the middle of this. It’s just her and Harry, which is both terrifying and disconcerting, but for Ron they will figure this out. “We’ll deal with this. Even if I have to get a Potion Mastery to figure out how to mass produce Wolfsbane and become the Minister of Magic to force the Wizengamot to apply some fucking common sense to the situation,” she states. It’s not a bad idea. Even if she doesn’t become the Minister of Magic, she can still take a seat on the Wizengamot.

Harry has five seats. Three of them bestowed upon him from extinct family lines and two of them inherited. Hermione could easily fill one in order to give Kingsley a little more support in politics. And if she has a Potion Mastery, she can do the necessary research for improvement on the Wolfsbane potion without relying on someone else.

“Another Mastery and world domination are too much, even for you,” Harry mumbles. “I’ll get a Potion Mastery and deal with the Wolfsbane issue and you take over the Wizengamot.”

A job in politics isn’t what she wants, though to be fair, Hermione isn’t sure what she wants to do after her Masteries. She got an offer from Alfred yesterday to join the Department of Mysteries as an Unspeakable. On one hand, it sounds like her dream job, to be paid to study and research the truths of this world. On the other, Ron needs her to pave a way with laws and policies to guarantee he doesn’t lose everything he’s worked so hard to get.

In the end, it’s not much of a choice. She leans over to kiss Harry’s forehead again. “Deal.”

* * *

It’s the first full moon since Ron was bitten. He’s still unconscious, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s required to be at Azkaban for his transformation. A block of cells has been converted into specialized ones that will contain werewolves throughout their transformation. Every auror who was infected during the battle is required to show up.

Hermione didn’t work too hard to stop that stipulation because there are too many things she needed to block in the Wizengamot and she and Harry haven’t finished setting up a safe place for Ron to transform at home, yet.

Charlie carries Ron down the halls of Azkaban with help from Harry and Hermione makes note of everyone they pass, including the toddler who must be the sole survivor from the muggles forced infection, on their way to Ron’s assigned cell. He’s tiny, can’t be more than three of four, curled into a ball at the back of his cell. There’s a thin blanket with large holes barely covering him and Hermione can barely hear his soft sobbing. Poor thing, he must be so scared. At least he’ll only be here for the night and then he’ll be returned to whoever the ministry assigned as a caretaker.

Charlie settles Ron inside his assigned cell, fighting the urge to stay by his side, Hermione and Harry exit alongside Charlie. The sooner she obtains Mandrake leaves for the animagus potion, the sooner she and Harry can stay with Ron during his transformations.

Charlie leaves, promising to return in the morning, and there’s nothing else for them to do but wait. They settle down on the ground in front of Ron’s cell and cuddle beneath a blanket with a powerful warmth enchantment woven into the fabric, sipping hot chocolate and nibbling on a bar of milk chocolate. When Ron transforms, it doesn’t look anything like other transformations Hermione’s seen before nor any of the ones occurring around her. It’s slower and more abrupt, like Ron’s body is fighting a losing battle to transform. Like Harry’s magic is fighting a losing battle against the curse.

He sleeps through the whole thing. She keeps watch with Harry the entire night, never releasing Harry’s hand, even when Harry repels the dementors that head towards them with a viciousness that he only ever directs at the creatures. The other werewolves snarl and lunge at them from their cells, but Hermione ignores them, focusing on the slow steady movements of Ron’s chest.

He’s not expected to survive this transformation.

Hours later, Ron transforms back. This transformation is just as abnormal as his previous one. It’s smoother than it should be, quicker too. One of his arms is broken, but other than that Ron appears to be okay. A guard comes to the area, unlocking cells so the aurors can leave, some of them are helped by friends and family; the rest are accompanied by members from the force. Susan cheerfully waves at them while helping one of the senior members out of his cell. His left leg is broken and covered in bite marks.

Hermione steps back, resisting the urge to crowd around Ron when Charlie steps into his cell to pick him up. Harry shadows him, creeping around Charlie to keep both his hands in view. It brings a small smile to her lips. Harry probably doesn’t even realize what he’s doing.

With Ron in Charlie’s arms, they slowly make their way to the exit, passing by the many Death Eaters still locked in the cells lining the walls. They pass the toddler again, still huddled at the back and sobbing, the blanket he’d been underneath torn to shreds. His cell door is shut and it doesn’t look like his caretaker is here yet.

It’s odd, but as much as Hermione would like to look into it, she needs to get Ron settled into bed and figure out what she’s going to do about his broken arm. Harry must sense her distraction because he tilts his head towards her, raising an eyebrow. She knows he’ll be stubborn about it too. If she doesn’t tell him what she’s thinking about, Harry’s liable to stop walking and pout at her.

She nods towards the toddler’s cell and Harry pauses the second he processes what he sees. His eyes narrow, lips pressed into a thin line, and he steps forward. And then he stops, guilty green eyes flicking over to Ron and then to her. Hermione can’t stop the fond sigh that escapes her nor the small chuckle that slips out when Harry pouts at her. She nods at him and steps around Charlie to takeover Harry’s place as additional support and Harry storms down the hallway to the guard still unlocking cells.

Charlie flounders for a second, “Wait, where is he going?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Hermione murmurs, nudging him into stepping forward. “He’ll catch up to us later.”

* * *

It takes all day to get Ron’s broken arm sorted. The first stop at Saint Mungo’s proves to be as useless as Hermione had feared. There’s still too much of Harry’s magic running through Ron for the healers to do anything. She had Charlie take them to a muggle hospital and dismissed him while she settled into the waiting room with Ron.

It took a careful application of compulsion charms to make sure no one questioned why Hermione had a coma patient with a broken arm with her, but she got it done. Ron is back in their bed, broken arm securely in a cast. Hermione is sitting on the couch, nursing a cup of tea and wondering if she should call Molly over to stay with Ron while she hunts down Harry, when she hears the sharp crack of apparition.

She feels Harry next.

His magic is thrashing in the air, releasing a fierce rush of rage with every movement. When Harry steps into the living room, the toddler from earlier in his arms, Hermione thinks she should be surprised, but honestly, she’s more amused. “Harry,” she sighs, placing her cup down on the coffee table.

Harry storms passed her, grabbing a blanket and wrapping it around the child. He rocks the child gently, rubbing his back, and continues pacing the room. It’s not until the child’s breath deepens, settling into a pattern, that Harry sits down beside her, still clutching the child tight to his chest, and she wraps one arm around his shoulders. He turns to her miserable and frustrated. “They’ve been keeping him in Azkaban.”

She stops, feels her whole world shift into a furious red haze. “What?”

“They’ve been keeping him in Azkaban,” he repeats. “The guard says that there’s no where else to put a werewolf. They were just going to keep him there until they found his parents. Not that they’ve been looking all that hard.” The last sentence is muttered angrily under his breath, but that doesn’t stop her from hearing it.

Hermione lets out a slow breath, fighting down the urge to scream at the injustice of it all, as she examines the boy.

He’s a baby. An actual baby. Probably somewhere around Teddy’s age. He’s Teddy’s age and he’s been locked up in the highest security Azkaban has to offer, surrounded by dementors. He’s skin and bones. She can’t prove that he didn’t get that way while a prisoner of Death Eaters, but it’s been weeks since he was rescued. He should have some meat on his eyes. The dark circles around his eyes shouldn’t be there either.

He whimpers in his sleep and Hermione can almost see the way Harry’s magic reacts to the sound. It curls around the toddler, soft and warm and solid enough that Hermione can feel it where her skin brushes against Harry’s.

It’s peculiar the way Harry’s magic has been almost corporeal recently. She’s never heard of anything similar happening before. It’s something she needs to investigate, but with so many other pressing concerns popping up she’s been forced to put it off. It isn’t hurting him. Harry usually isn’t even aware of it. It isn’t hurting him and Hermione has to force herself to keep that fact in mind, so she doesn’t ignore her other responsibilities.

“Kingsley?” she asks, several different questions shoved into a single word.

“Had no idea.” Harry’s getting agitated. Hermione can feel a faint buzzing coming from him. It’s heavy. It’s like hearing crack of thunder off in the far distance and knowing a terrible storm is heading your way.

The baby whimpers and in an instant that dark feeling vanishes, replaced by something soft and warm. For a moment, Hermione is reminded of waking up screaming, the claws of a nightmare sunk deep into her mind, to Ron’s arms wrapped around her and Harry’s stream of soft whispered safety.

“He’s going to be staying with us until his parents are found,” Harry continues, shifting the child’s weight from one arm to the other.

“What’s his name?” The boy has dark hair, not the same inky darkness as Harry, but still shades darker than Hermione. Watching Harry with this boy, clutching him close to his chest, reminds her of what a good father he would make, It’s easy to imagine Harry rocking a newborn baby, one with tufts of bushy brown hair, a heavy dusting of freckles, and vibrant green eyes.

“No idea,” Harry mumbles, standing up. “He hasn’t said a word to anyone.” The slight movement jostles the toddler enough that he begins to whine softly. Harry shushes him, rubbing his back gently until he quiets. “I’m going to put him down for the night.”

“Where are you planning to put him?” There are only two bedrooms in the apartment. They never needed more. And while her parents were completely appalled and horribly offended when they found out Hermione was living in a two-bedroom apartment with two men, she’s never seen a point in not sharing a bed with Ron when she’s having sex with him. Especially since Hermione knows Ron is the man she’ll marry one day.

“My room.” Harry cocks his head at her and Hermione can read the glimmer of confusion in his eyes.

“I’m just worried he might be a little scared if he wakes up alone in the middle of the night.”

“I was—I was planning to stay with him.” Harry is analyzing her and she forces her face into some neutral expression before she starts panicking.

She hasn’t slept alone in a room in years. During their final year at Hogwarts, Lavender and Parvati had been in her room, in addition to Ginny and some of the other seventh year girls. She’s shared a room with Ron ever since she graduated.

And it’s fine. The war is over. Ron will be in the room with her. But, if someone breaks in, Ron won’t wake to help her. It’ll just be her and the intruder and—No one is going to break into their apartment. Hermione feels her nails digging into the palm of her hands and struggles to uncurl her fingers before she breaks skin.

“I’m usually awake early to make breakfast,” Harry says after a moment of silence. His eyes have softened into something Hermione is too distressed to make sense of. “It might be easier if we stay with you. To make sure he’s not alone when I get up.”

And that’s, well, that’s such Harry thing to do. She’s not too dense to not understand the real reason nor is she too prideful to ignore it. “Thank you, Harry.”

“Anytime, ‘Mi.”

Harry exits the room, and as she watches him walk away, Hermione’s struck by a thought: Why would any child have her hair, Ron’s freckles, and Harry’s eyes?

* * *

Hermione is sitting in the courtroom in the Ministry of Magic. Harry is on her left, Arthur beside him, and Percy beside him. Andromeda is sitting on her right. This is the best Hermione could do with Harry’s five seats and she hopes this is enough.

Today, they vote on discrimination against werewolves. The goal is to make it illegal for employers to fire employees for having lycanthropy and to make it illegal to refuse to hire them for the same reason. It will be a close vote. Not unattainable as it would have been three days ago, but an interview done by Rita Skeeter, published in The Quibbler, explaining how Harry Potter, The-Boy-Who-Lived, The-Man-Who-Conquered, The Saviour of Wizarding Britain, will leave England and move somewhere with a more acceptable attitude towards werewolves if the Ministry of Magic doesn’t shape up and do something about anti-werewolf propaganda is more than enough to sway things in their favour.

It got the Wizengamot to meet for a vote after all. Hermione is sure that the majority of the people who vote with her will be doing it either to get on Harry’s good side or because they don’t think there will be any way to enforce the law. There won’t be one immediately, but Hermione already has an idea of how to go about making sure no one breaks it.

Magical contracts, as Marietta had discovered, are binding. Even if you don’t know all of the clauses.

She scans the room, taking note of the expression on her opponents. After almost three months of arguing with these people, she has a good idea of how everyone will vote. It’s roughly even. It depends on the swing votes and the ones who will abstain from voting. On such an important issue, she doubts anyone will abstain from voting, but at the same time she can’t completely discard the option. Really, it’s the swing votes she has to worry about. When her eyes fall on him, Draco sneers at her until she looks away.

It’s annoying.

The Malfoys had forfeited their seat on the Wizengamot after the first fall of Voldemort back in 1980 as a way to stay out of Azkaban. Narcissa had managed to get it back during the Ministry Purge as a way reward for lying to Voldemort during the final battle. Draco’s been filling the seat ever since. Hermione could do without seeing his face every time she walked into the courtroom, but there’s nothing she can do to kick him out.

When the voting begins, Hermione feels something like a manic relief when Harry grabs her hand under the table, gripping her hand as hard as she must be gripping his. The vote against comes up to twenty-four because to Hermione’s confusion and delight, Draco abstains from voting. When they vote for the motion, Marcos Incertus, a soon to be dead man because Hermione is going to murder him in his sleep tonight, abstains from voting.

They’re in a stalemate. This matter isn’t going to be solved today. She needs it to be solved today, while the public is still scared that Harry will leave them. Across the room, Draco looks her in the eyes, before his gaze moves to Harry, raises his wand, and votes.

25:24.

The motion passes. Hermione is both concerned and elated and the mix of emotion is enough to keep her from fully focusing on everything else that’s being said. She has a quill taking notes for her, writing every spoken word down so she can review it later, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s barely paying attention. The only thing she can focus on is Harry’s hand in her own and the knowledge that they did it. Ron won’t be unemployed when he wakes.

It’s not until they’re standing in outside the courtroom, the murmurs of the press and other members around her, that Hermione feels herself coming back. Harry hasn’t let go of her hand and when she squeezes his hand, he jolts, almost like he’s coming back to himself.

“We did it,” she says. “We did it.” She repeats it because it hits her. They did it. They actually managed to pull this off. She’s been thinking about it ever since the vote, but saying it out loud changes it. Saying it out loud makes it real.

Harry grins at her and it’s the happiest she’s seen him in months. “We did it! We—” The smile drops off his face, twisting into something on the angrier side of neutral, and Hermione turns around, ready to curse whoever put that look on his face.

Draco Malfoy walks up to them, customary sneer in place. “Potter, consider my debt repaid.” He walks away before they can respond and Hermione thinks that might be one of the best interactions she’s ever had with that boy.

“Well, I made out like a bandit,” Harry snorts, a small smile working its way to his lips. When she raises an eyebrow at him, Harry shrugs. “Ron’s happiness is worth way more than three Malfoys.”

And when he puts it like that, Hermione really can’t argue. She’d save Malfoy millions of times during the Battle for Hogwarts if it meant that Ron would be happy. Three times is a paltry amount, but that’s all it cost them.

“Well said, Harry.” Arthur gently claps Harry on the shoulder and to Hermione’s relief Harry isn’t feeling skittish enough to immediately pull away. “Well said.”

* * *

It’s been six months since Ron was bitten. He’s still not awake. He’s lost muscle mass and Hermione knows he’ll be devastated when he wakes up. It’s a slow process, significantly slower than it would be for a muggle, and Hermione isn’t sure if it’s slow because he’s a wizard or because he’s a werewolf.

Dylan, as they’ve named the toddler, has been a welcome addition to their home. He adores Harry in the way only a rescued child can and Harry loves him back just as strongly. He’s shy, though. Shy enough that he hides from Molly whenever she comes to sit with Ron. Shy enough that he’s nervous enough around Ginny that she can’t babysit him alone. He’s taken a liking to Luna and Neville, though. Luna is the only person beside Harry who Dylan is willing to ask to pick him up. When he gets overwhelmed and overstimulated by others, he always runs to curl up with Ron, a blanket over his head.

Every smile Hermione gets from him is a battle to earn and so very rewarding. She’s very fond of him and part of her dreads giving him back to his parents.

Especially when she thinks of how that will affect Harry.

He’s sitting on the floor, playing with a set of blocks that match the ones Harry had bought for Teddy months ago, while she finishes up some research for her final project for her Charms Mastery.

When Harry apparates into their apartment, the sharp cracking noise has Dylan on his feet, toddling to the door as fast as his little legs will take him. She hears Harry laughing, can imagine the gentle smile on his face as the toddler clings to his legs. “Hey, D, look who came to visit! Say, ‘Hi’, Teddy!”

“Lel’lo!”

She doesn’t hear Dylan’s response, but that’s not unexpected. Harry walks into the kitchen with a child on each hip, he settles the toddlers on the floor near Dylan’s blocks and a flick of his wand causes Teddy’s blocks to zoom into the room and stack in front of the boy with suspiciously bushy brown hair.

“What was the emergency?” she asks, as Harry settles down in front of a messy pile of notes and _A Collection of Above Three Hundred Receipts in Cookery, Physick, and Surgery_ and _The Ingredient Encyclopedia_ he had abandoned when Andromeda’s howler had sent him running to her home.

“She has dragon pox, so Teddy will be staying with us until she recovers.” Harry mumbles, already distracted by the assignment Potion Master Jiggers had given him. The assignment is a brutal thing, breaking down every recipe in the book and explain how and why they work. Next, for each recipe, Harry needs to substitute every ingredient and still get the same result. After that he needs to modify each recipe, removing at least three ingredients and two steps, to produce the same affects. The final part is to brew every single recipe in the book, alongside the counterparts he creates.

It makes Hermione cringe on the inside. Mostly because Arsenius Jiggers has only agreed to take Harry on as an apprentice if he manages to complete this task in one year. It’s an absurd criterion, not even Charms Master Haddock nor Defence Master Belmont’s tasks had been this bad. And while Harry could just find another Potions Master, one with reasonable expectations, he refuses to because Harry is, as Ginny loves to point out, a sentimental dork.

And Arsenius Jiggers is the one who gave Severus Snape his Mastery.

It’s baffling almost. Harry hadn’t liked Snape while he’d been alive. His death hadn’t made him like the man either. Harry has complicated feelings towards Severus Snape and for some reason, he’s decided to honour Snape like this, by learning from his Master, which is better in the long run. If Harry wasn’t learning from Master Jiggers than Hermione would have to worry about a future child named something like Albus Severus.

She’s already very worried about the real possibility of a child named James Sirius Potter, but Albus Severus is just pushing it.

“Well,” Hermione says, retuning to her work, “it’ll be nice to have Teddy around for the next week or two.” Andromeda’s urgency makes sense, as well as Harry’s nonchalance. Dragon pox is usually only fatal to the very old and very young. While Andromeda would have been better off without contracting the disease, at her age she should make a full recovery soon.

* * *

Ron’s been in a coma for seven months when it finally happens. The tension between her and Harry and the Weasley’s finally snaps. Everyone is gathered at their apartment for Ron’s birthday. Ron was finally at some form of magically stable. They were able to vanish his waste and spell food into his stomach again. When Hannah had swung by to give him a quick check up last week, she’d suspected that Ron would wake up sometime this month.

It was good news. It was great news.

Except, it was stirring up a lot a conflict.

Now, that Ron no longer needed feeding tubes or an IV, Molly wanted to bring him back to the Burrow. Hermione can understand that she wants her son close to her after this ordeal, and normally this wouldn’t be a problem. Normally, they would all just stay at the Burrow until Ron woke up. Normally, Harry doesn’t feel unwelcomed at the Burrow.

Because the issue with Molly hasn’t been resolved. It hasn’t been resolved and it won’t be resolved until Ron wakes up and fixes it.

Harry won’t go to the Burrow when he feels like he’s not wanted there and Hermione can’t leave Harry alone because Ron would never forgive her for that. And while they could just let Molly take Ron and remain at their apartment, she doesn’t want to. Hermione doesn’t want to let Molly take her boyfriend out of her sight.

The ensuing argument between her and Molly over where Ron stays is loud enough that it sends both Dylan and Teddy, a permanent addition to their home ever since Andromeda passed away two weeks ago from dragon pox, scurrying to Harry who scoops them both up in his arms and carries them out of the kitchen.

When Harry returns to the kitchen, Arthur has his arms wrapped around Molly, soothing her grief-induced rage. “Calm down, Mollywobbles, you’re going to make yourself sick. Yelling at Hermione isn’t going to fix this. This isn’t her fault.”

“No,” George says, speaking for the first time since he’d arrived. “It’s not Hermione’s fault. It’s Harry’s.”

For a second, Hermione thinks her mind is playing tricks on her. She must have misheard him. There’s no way George just said that. Harry flinches from beside her and Hermione has to face reality. George did just blame Harry. He blamed Harry and Harry heard him and Hermione is so angry she thinks she might be able to cast the Killing Curse without any difficulty.

She opens her mouth to retort, but George interrupts. “Don’t defend him! Everyone who hangs around you always seems to end up hurt, if not dead, Harry. I lost an ear; Fred lost his life!” It’s like a train wreck. His last sentence indicates to Hermione that this outburst isn’t really about Ron. George is just hurting and lashing out recklessly. He hasn’t recovered from Fred’s death, not that anyone expects a full recovery, and Ron’s injury is another painful reminder of Fred’s absence.

That doesn’t make it okay. That doesn’t make this alright.

“Ron’s never going to recover after this and it’s all your fault! How many of my brothers need to die for you before you’re finally happy, Harry?” George is crying now, crying and shouting. He tries to approach him, but Percy yanks him back, whispering something into his ears. “No! No! I won’t calm down. I’m right! You all know I’m right! It’s a good thing Ginny broke up with him; otherwise, Harry would have made sure we’d buried her by now!”

Hermione goes for her wand. She reaches for her wand in the same second Ginny does. Neville grabs Ginny by the wrist before she does something that she will not regret while Hermione’s wand flies out of her hand and into Harry’s without warning.

“Either apologize or get out.” The voice that speaks is hoarse and husky, with almost a gritty texture to it. Underneath those new qualities is a familiarity that brings tears to her eyes. Everyone turns as one to look at the kitchen entrance. Bracing himself against the fridge, Ron glares at George with the burning embers of rage that are normally only directed at his enemies. “Either apologize to Harry or get out.”

“Ron—” It’s a rush of noise from everyone that’s cut off when Ron slashes his wand.

“No one comes into our home and speaks to Harry like that. Apologize.”

There’s a beat of silence when everyone alternates between looking at George and Harry that’s broken when Harry clears his throat. “It’s—”

“Don’t say ‘it’s fine’!” Hermione isn’t the only one who says it. Ron says it. As do Ginny, Neville, Luna, and Angelina.

George tears his eyes away from Ron and looks at Harry. A mixture of grief and guilt plays across his features and he opens his mouth. Nothing comes out at first, just a few shuddering breaths. “I didn’t—I’m sorry, Harry. I didn’t mean—” George becomes more distressed with every word that spills from his lips, but before Hermione can worry for more than an instant, Angelina wraps an arm around his neck and begins whispering in his ear.

When he’s calmed down enough, Harry steps forward. “It’s—”

“Oi!” Ron snaps, pushing himself off the fridge and stumbling over to her and Harry. “What did we just tell you?” When he makes it to them, she and Harry do their best to provide support, but Ron is very tall making it a difficult task to accomplish. She pushes up on her toes, aiming for Ron’s mouth but getting his chin, and kisses the skin there. Ron aligns them properly for the second kiss, which is longer than it should be with so many people around. Their third kiss is properly chaste and afterwards Hermione wipes away the tears that have started to fall.

“Alright?” Ron asks Harry. Harry who is supposed to be supporting Ron, but it looks more like Ron’s got him safely tucked into his side, nods, his first unburdened smile in over half a year on his lips. “So,” Ron asks, addressing the room, “what have I missed?”

It’s at this point the others in the room all race forward and Ron’s birthday party really begins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It took awhile, but this chapter is finally done. And proof that I can't stick to an update schedule even if I have pre-written work. Because I am an incredibly responsible adult.


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